Pages

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Movie Tie-in Games

At first, a movie tie-in game sounds like a great idea. They combine two of my favorite things: movies and video games. But it's a real shame that so many of them are bad. In fact, it's a rare occurrence. I usually don't even bother with them, since they usually end up being pretty similar. They usually have decent combat, but very weak dialogue. The graphics are usually decent, but graphics play a very small part in influencing my opinion of a game. Telling you which ones to avoid would take too long, so let me tell you which ones are actually good and worth the money. Firstly is this past summer's Amazing Spider-Man. I get annoyed when games try to cram a whole bunch of extra stuff into the plot of the movie, but this game avoids that by setting the game after the movie, which I don't mind unless they try to stick scenes from the movie in there, but they didn't, so that was fine. The gameplay is fun and the combat doesn't make you remember long complicated combos in order to do cool stuff. Where dialogue is concerned, it's not as deep as some more story centric games, but there's nothing wrong with it, plus the characters sound like they did in the movie. Another movie game that I liked was one of the James Bond games. Most of them were pretty good. I didn't love Agent Under Fire and I thought Nightfire was pretty, but it's not connected to any of the movies. I thought From Russia with Love was good even though it deviates from the movie. But it also had a great 4 player splitscreen deathmatch type thing, which was especially fun when you found a jetpack, an armored car, or the controls for various traps located throughout the maps. I think I liked Nightfire a little bit more, but as far as the movie games are concerned, this one is the best I've played, even counting the more recent Quantum of Solace. I l Ike the Bond games because they combine elements of a stealth game and an FPS, and often give you fun gadgets to play with. Or if you want more all out violence, I recommend another Marvel game, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It's fun to slice people up with your claws, and the story follows the movie fairly closely. You also get to take advantage of Logan's animalistic senses. The only real issue I've had with it is that sometimes you need to press a button to open a door, but nothing will happen unless you're standing in exactly the right place, which can get frustrating. So I think those are the best movie tie-in games I've played. There are some others that are supposed to be decent, but this is just from the ones I've actually played. I won't give a final verdict since I'm talking about a genre if games, plus multiple individual games, but if I was, all three of these games would get very high marks for being good, and also for being good movie games.